30 September 2010

Sea-dwelling reptiles hundreds of millions of years ago were warmblooded, according to a new study led by Lyon University. It’s the clearest sign that some ancient reptiles, unlike modern ones, had a metabolism similar to that of mammals. Oxygen atoms in fossil teeth show plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs (ten-foot-long Stenopterygius quadriscissus) had internal temperatures of 95 to 102 degrees Fahrenheit, even in chilly water.

Most of you know the backstory about the rarest bird in the United States. Here is an update -

Three years ago, I began working with Nancy Tanner on a book about her husband’s fieldwork. In June 2009, she discovered a faded manila envelope in the back of a drawer at her home in Knoxville, Tennessee. In it were some ivory-bill images. At her invitation, I started going through them.

One of the first things I found was a glassine envelope containing a 2 1/4- by 3 1/4-inch negative. Holding it up to the light, I realized it was of the nestling ivory-bill from the Singer Tract—an image I had never seen. I quickly found another negative, then another and another. My hands began to shake. It turned out that Tanner had taken not 6 pictures on that long-ago March 6, but 14. As a group, they show the young bird not frozen in time, but rather clambering over Kuhn like a cat on a scratching post, frightened but vital.

The rest of the story is in the September issue of Smithsonian magazine, or at the link, which has an additional half-dozen photos, which have never before been available to the public.

29 September 2010

A late-summer immigrant to Wisconsin from more southerly regions; does not overwinter this far north. I photographed this one this afternoon at the Grady Tract of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. I would love to document a life cycle on this beautiful creature; perhaps next spring I can spot one ovipositing on some plantain.

A case from 2006, nicely filmed and documented, and well worth watching for those who don't mind viewing internal anatomy and some enormous parasites. The last one minute of the film is enormously gratifying after watching the previous part...

This is described as "West Saxon literary dialect of Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon)." Thankfully with subtitles (which you'll probably need fullscreen to read). It's interesting how some words are virtually unchanged since the 11th century - but I doubt I could get by were I suddenly to become a Minnesota Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Re the absence of "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen", I found this at Wikipedia:

The doxology of the prayer is not contained in Luke's version, nor is it present in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew, representative of the Alexandrian text, but is present in the manuscripts representative of the Byzantine text...

High divorce rates, rising co-habitation and a tendency to delay marriage are main factors.

Marriage rates among young adults have been dropping for decades. But data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau show that for the first time the proportion of people between the ages of 25 and 34 who have never been married exceeded those who were married in 2009—46.3% versus 44.9%...

Officials point to myriad reasons, including a lack of ducks, aging Baby Boomers, urbanization, time and access constraints and the simple fact that hunting ducks can be more difficult and expensive than hunting other species...

"Jesus Martinez-Frias, a planetary geologist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, pioneered research into megacryometeors in January 2000 after ice chunks weighing up to 6.6 pounds (3.0 kg) rained on Spain out of cloudless skies for ten days.

The process that creates megacryometeors is not fully understood, mainly in relation with the atmospheric dynamics necessary to produce them. They may have a similar mechanism of formation to that producing hailstones. Scientific studies show that their composition matches normal tropospheric rainwater for the areas in which they fall. In addition, megacryometeors display textural variations of the ice and hydro-chemical and isotopic heterogeneity, which evidence a complex formation process in the atmosphere. It is known that they do not come from airplane toilets because the large chunks of ice that occasionally do fall from airliners are distinctly blue due to the disinfectant used. However, others have speculated that these ice chunks must have fallen from aircraft fuselages after plain water ice accumulating on those aircraft through normal atmospheric conditions has simply broken loose. However, similar events occurred prior to the invention of aircraft...

More than 50 megacryometeors have been recorded since the year 2000. They vary in mass between 0.5 kilograms (1.1 lb) to more than 200 kilograms (440 lb). One in Brazil weighed in at 220 kilograms (490 lb)."

It's fitting that one of the earliest known depictions of quicksand comes from one of the earliest known comic strips—a 230-foot-long piece of linen embroidered with wool yarn nearly 1,000 years ago. The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, and in one panel, Harold, later King of England, pauses to rescue a pair of soldiers who have become trapped in the mud near Mont St. Michel...

"Allegedly they were sourced from an endangered strain in South Africa and have been cultivated for the past seven years, now available for limited commercial purchase in Europe. They have the same genetic makeup as a strawberry, but are white with red seeds and taste like pineapples."

The insects are a major nuisance in North America as they are a scourge to livestock, and many states operate control programmes based on spraying pesticides. In Africa, the insect plays a key role in the transmission of the parasite that causes river blindness...

Stuart Hine, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum, said: "Blackflies are quite pernicious. Their mouth parts are scissor-like and they lacerate the skin and then suck the blood. They inject an anaesthetic so after the initial bite you can't feel it. When you scratch it and germs get in, then you can get a serious infection...

"By lunchtime, my leg was so swollen, an occupational health nurse feared I had deep-vein thrombosis and sent me to an accident and emergency ward. I was limping heavily and my leg was getting bigger by the hour... The next day when I returned to A&E my leg was too big to pull up my trousers..."

Personally I've always dreaded deerflies more than blackflies. No post about blackflies would be complete without including a video of the famous Canadian folk song by Wade Hemsworth, based on his true-life personal experience. The lyrics are in the pulldown at the YouTube link.

Many blogs today are citing some of the results of the U. S. Religious Knowledge Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life. Most discussions seem to focus on the finding that atheists and agnostics as a group scored higher on the survey than did persons with affiliations to conventional religious groups. The Executive Summary discusses this result and the other observations from the survey.

The Pew site also offers a abbreviated quiz for the general public (15 questions, compared to 32 on the actual survey). My results are shown above; I missed just one question (on the Jewish Sabbath - forgive me, Ira!). I should think that most TYWKIWDBI readers will do just as well, because the questions do not really require knowledge of dogma or doctrine - just simple knowledge about Mother Theresa and Bible stories and Ramadan and such. What surprises me is how poorly the public does on what seem to be basic knowledge questions. Below are the results (sorted by religious affiliation) for the abbreviated quiz, which I invite you to try at this link.

Erich Schuller, of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, said his lab has recently carried out tests in which they used brand new steins and hit them against human skulls. "The bones often will break, but we haven't been able to break the steins," Schuller told SPIEGEL. "A hard hit with a stein packs more than 8,500 newtons of power -- the human head in the parietal region breaks with about 4,000 newtons."

One of them, ICBM launch officer Captain Robert Salas, was on duty during one missile disruption incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base and was ordered to never discuss it. Another participant, retired Col. Charles Halt, observed a disc-shaped object directing beams of light down into the RAF Bentwaters airbase in England and heard on the radio that they landed in the nuclear weapons storage area. Both men will provide stunning details about these events, and reveal how the U.S. military responded.

More at the link. I didn't know what to think of it. Today the story was picked up by the Telegraph - re British nuclear weapons sites:

He said: "I believe that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted - both then and now - to subvert the significance of what occurred at RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practised methods of disinformation."

The testimony was supposed to take place today. I'll defer any commentary, except to say I'd be delighted if it's true.

"...the complex eyes of the peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) perceive more colours than you can imagine."

The comment probably refers to the fact that these creatures can see ultraviolet and infrared. Awesome. (I wonder if that is why at least this one seems to have asymmetric eyes and curious stomata in the globe?)

"I've done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole...

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann said, "I don't know where they're going to get all this money, because we're running out of rich people in this country." Actually, we have more billionaires here in the U.S. than all the other countries in the top ten combined, and their wealth grew 27% in the last year. Did yours?

Even 39% isn't high by historical standards. Under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 91%. Under Nixon, it was 70%. Obama just wants to kick it back to 39 -- just three more points for the very rich. Not back to 91, or 70. Three points. And they go insane...

Until now, the three branch locations have been part of the Los Angeles County library system. Under the new contract, the branches will be withdrawn from county control and all operations — including hiring staff and buying books — ceded to L.S.S.I...

Library employees are often the most resistant to his company, said Mr. Pezzanite, a co-founder of L.S.S.I. — and, he suggested, for reasons that only reinforce the need for a new approach.

“Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension...

More at the link, although it doesn't explain how the company will make a profit running the libraries. Presumably they receive a fee from the state, and then run the library for less than the fee amount. (?)

The nest, atop a 130-foot light pole at Hwy. 169 and Crosstown Hwy. 62, has been home to the distinctive black-and-white raptors for the past five years. When workers began replacing nearby poles last spring, the sight fueled many concerned calls to the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and the nest got a reprieve... MnDOT held off removing the pole until the adults and this year's three offspring were gone. The birds emptied the nest last month and headed back to South America.

The nest is 4 feet across and 2 feet deep. More details at the Star Tribune.

26 September 2010

Eric Fischer has a remarkable Flickr set of over a hundred city maps which plot population according to race and/or ethnicity: "Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000."

"But the superstitious noted that the death of Prince Albert Victor on a Thursday broke a remarkable spell or curse which had hung over the present royal family of England for more than a century and three-quarters — bringing about the death of all the prominent members of that family on Saturdays. William III died Saturday, March 18, 1702; Queen Anne died Saturday, August 1, 1714; George I died Saturday, June 10, 1727; George II died Saturday, October 25, 1760; George III died Saturday, January 29, 1820; George IV died Saturday, June 26, 1830; the Duchess of Kent died Saturday, March 16, 1861; the Prince Consort, husband of Queen Victoria and grandfather of the recent deceased Prince Albert Victor, died Saturday, December 14, 1861; Princess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, Victoria’s second daughter, and sister of Albert, died Saturday, December 14, 1878..."

– William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

One wonders whether the list is simply selectively compiled from the obits of a huge family, or whether circumstances of the era made it more "convenient" for deaths to occur on Saturdays.

Anyone who has read The Kite Runner knows the importance of kites in the lives of Afghan children. This week, the U.S. Agency for International Development arranged an event to give away kites to children.

But the policemen appeared to ignore her. Asked why one of his officers was loading his truck with kites, Maj. Farouk Wardak, head of the criminal investigation division of the 16th Police District, said, "It's OK. He's not just a policeman, he's my bodyguard."

The district police chief, Col. Haji Ahmad Fazli, insisted on taking over from the American contractors the job of passing out the kites. He denied that his men were kite thieves.

"We are not taking them," he said. "We are flying them ourselves."

The rest of the story is at the Star Tribune link. Ironically, the kite festival was being conducted "to promote the use of Afghanistan's justice system and increase public legal knowledge." What a totally f***ed-up country.

Several weeks ago I wrote a post about chopines, based on an intriguing photo with a long-distance view of the footwear. This week I found the much better image above; the items are dated ~1600, and come from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum:

These chopines are made of pine-wood. The wood is covered in kid leather with punched decoration and figured silk underlay. This pair are fairly modest. More extreme versions were over 50 cms high. Chopines were based on the shoes worn at Turkish baths. They were first worn by Venetian prostitutes and fashionable Venetian aristocrats then adopted them. The chopine was originally a form of overshoe, which is why it has no back. Later versions could be worn as either overshoes or on their own.

I've been blogging the "severed feet washing ashore" saga in the Pacific Northwest since its onset, so for completeness I should probably report on other similar incidents. A hat tip therefore to reader Djinny for notifying me that a a jogger found a boot with a foot and part of a leg floating in the Tennessee River near Chattanooga. A later report indicated that a body wearing military style clothing, but missing a leg and foot has subsequently been located in the river.

More details at the Telegraph and at the New York Times. Now for my personal context...

In the late 1950s my family went to Florida for a winter vacation and visited the Daytona Beach area. In those days it was permissible to drive one's car on the beach [?is that still true?]. Because the car was not on a highway, my father decided it would be o.k. for me to steer the car while sitting on his lap. As we zipped down the beach, he told me we were going to get too close to an ice-cream vendor's shack, and told me to turn steer toward the left.

At about seven years of age, I had no experience steering cars, but plenty of experience steering a boat (those of you who grew up in the upper Midwest will understand...). The boats we rented at the lake were 16' wooden boats with 7.5 horsepower Evinrude outboard motors. Because it was a rear-mounted outboard, to turn the boat to the left, you pushed the tiller to the right.

And that's what I did with the car, turning the steering wheel to the right. Dad fortunately still had control of the brakes. I would have forgotten all about the incident, but was reminded of it on many occasions as I grew older.

The group of Munkiana Devil Rays were spotted in Baja California Sur, Mexico, by German conservation photographer Florian Schulz. He described how he was able to capture his jaw-dropping image named Flight of the Rays: "During an aerial expedition I came across something I had never seen before. Not even my pilot, who has surveyed this area for 20 years, had seen anything like it. As we got closer we started to discover its nature: an unprecedented congregation of rays. The group was as thick as it was wide, all heading towards the same direction.

People are always terrified of change. The idea was to try to keep everything just the way it was … not to let the strings become untuned. Capitalism untunes all the strings. Capitalism is, as Appleby says, a relentless revolution. Joseph Schumpeter, the columnist, in 1942 defined capitalism as creative annihilation — it wipes out entire industries. There’s always a momentum for something new...

"Freeway signs warning of upcoming drug checkpoints are actually a ruse: the local sheriff sets up a checkpoint at the next offramp and searches panicky motorists who pull off to ditch their stashes. An accompanying map on the original post gives the locations of similar checkpoints all over the USA, and warns, "if you see one of these signs, don't fucking exit.""

...some of the 700 or so members of the hospitality business who have either committed to, or are contemplating, legal action against TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel review site, over what they regard as unfair reports...

The Guardian spoke this week to a hotelier in the south-west of England who said he believed his business had been targeted on TripAdvisor by a sacked member of staff. The unfavourable review claimed the person had been bitten by fleas and seen rats...

Central to any case will be whether TripAdvisor, based in Newton, Massachusetts, and a part of the online travel firm Expedia, can be held liable as its business is based on publishing user-generated content – the opinions of others...

...a spokeswoman [for TripAdvisor] said: "We believe our more than 35m reviews and opinions are authentic and honest from real travellers, which is why we enjoy tremendous user loyalty and growth. If the reviews people read didn't paint an accurate picture users would not keep coming back." All reviews were screened by online tools and "quality assurance specialists" investigated "suspicious" ones. Hoteliers had the chance to post a response to reviews. TripAdvisor said it advised travellers to disregard the "anomalies that appear overly critical or overly complimentary".

While there could be some "sour grapes" responses from establishments getting mixed or bad reviews, it seems possible that if there are a limited number of establishments in a town or resort area, someone wanting to help their own situation could leave bad reviews for their competitors.

Thanks to its shared border with Canada, the Detroit River was notoriously hard to control. Historians estimate that up to 75 percent of the alcohol consumed in the United States during the Prohibition was transported by ordinary people (not just gangsters!) between Windsor, Canada, and Detroit. One of the more elaborate bootlegging devices was an cable tunnel that ferried submarine "torpedoes" filled with alcohol across the river. While customs guards focused on people smuggling alcohol under their clothes, this ingenious contraption quietly reeled in forty cases of liquor an hour.

Via Popular Science, where there is a gallery on The Science of Prohibition, 1919-1933.

American Book Review has listed their choices for the top 100 first lines. The ranking would of course be subjective and largely irrelevant, but it's fun to browse the list. Here are the first sixteen:

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Take a shaker tin and fill it 3/4 with ice. Add 2 ounces each of Malibu, Vodka, and Triple Sec first. Tilt the tin and add 2 ounces Grenadine. Then add 2 ounces OJ and 2 ounces Sweet and Sour. Finally topping it off with 2 ounces Blue Curacao.

22 September 2010

A great time to be out walking. Shown above: a New England aster, common in the fields, parks, and farmland margins around here, and a Crescent (not sure if it's a Pearl Crescent or a Northern Crescent), nectaring on what I believe is another type of aster.

21 September 2010

“A young worker mends army uniforms in America. Her sailor suit-style is typical of childrenswear at the time. Boys would have worn a similar top, but with trousers. The bows which girls wore in their hair became known as ‘flappers’ because of the way they fell onto the head. The name would stick with this generation, as they grew up in the Twenties.”

Text from Ordinary Finds, where there is always something interesting. Embedded above is the aforementioned Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity [a hat tip to Ryan for identifying the conductor as Taijiro Iimori leading the Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra]. I really love Isao Tomita's performance of The Planets on a Moog synthesizer, which I ought to blog sometime.

If I wait, I'll forget it. Here it his rendition of the Jupiter movement (not a very good video re sound or visuals, but it's all I could find):

I'm not questioning the incident, which was widely covered in the blogosphere and mainstream news services today. My question focuses on the wording of the title. For the discussion, I'll defer to Michael Quinion at World Wide Words:

Q: Am I right in thinking that “three troops were wounded” not only sounds daft but is incorrect when what is meant is “three soldiers”? “Three troopers”, yes, if they were part of a regiment that is or was mounted.

A: The traditional position that you are likely to find in reference books is that troop is a collective term for a group of people of unspecified number (it’s from medieval Latin troppus, a flock, and is the same word as troupe for a theatrical group). You can refer to more than one troop in the sense of a set of such collections (“the jamboree was attended by several dozen scout troops”) and use troops as a generalised collective term for the forces...

The usage of troops that you refer to is actually not that new. For more than two centuries writers have used it for a countable number of individuals, provided the number is large and not closely specified...

I’m told that singular troop for an individual has been recorded in US military slang from World War Two. People who were in the services during the 1950s and 1960s confirm it was then common in the US Army (“Yo troop! Take ten troops and police up that latrine!”)...

Troop has developed into a singular and small plural count noun for several reasons. There are now many more women in the various US armed forces and this presents gender-related difficulties in finding suitable terms for individuals (serviceman does not work any longer). More significantly, it’s been difficult to find an inclusive term for a single member of the combined services — soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and so on... Combatant is almost always pejorative (“enemy combatant”). Not least, troop is usefully short for fitting into headlines...

The sight is familiar to anyone from Wisconsin. Al Johnson's restaurant in Sister Bay, Door County (the "thumb" sticking into Lake Michigan is a classic vacation destination) has goats on the roof. I've eaten there several times and enjoyed the outstanding Scandinavian cuisine.

But I was disappointed to read this week that the restaurant sued another restaurant last year after discovering that the other one had also been using goats on their roof to attract customers.

Another restaurant in Sister Bay? No. Was it in Door County? No. In Wisconsin?? No. The other establishment (a market, not a restaurant) was 750 miles away - in Georgia forcryingoutloud.

Last year, he discovered that Tiger Mountain Market in Rabun County, Ga., had been grazing goats on its grass roof since 2007. Putting goats on the roof wasn't illegal. The violation, Al Johnson's alleged in a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, was that Tiger Mountain used the animals to woo business.

Al Johnson's "demanded that Defendant cease and desist such conduct, but Defendant has willfully continued to offer food services from buildings with goats on the roof," the suit continued. Danny Benson, the offending market's owner, says that "legally we could fight it, because it is ridiculous...

The rest of the story is at The Wall Street Journal. I fully understand the importance of copyright and trademark rights, but this case appears to me to be particularly small-minded. Our family will be vacationing in Door County again, but my dining plans will be to explore some other restaurants.

I've previously written posts both here and at Neatorama about the treasure trove of organic artifacts that are being revealed by melting, retreating glaciers. The report above comes from Reuters (via Huffington Post).

Many Swedes expressed disappointment that the Sweden Democrats won seats in the legislature. More than 6,000 protesters gathered in central Stockholm on Monday. Thousands of others, dressed in black clothes as an expression of mourning, marched in silence in Gothenburg...

Guy Consolmagno, who is one of the pope's astronomers, said he would be "delighted" if intelligent life was found among the stars...

...he said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. "Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul." Would he baptise an alien? "Only if they asked."

...Responding to Hawking's recent comments that the laws of physics removed the need for God, Consolmagno said: "Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist."

Click picture for bigger, and again for biggerbigger; worth more than a thousand words. Anyone been there? Are visitors allowed to go up in the turrets? If I ever have a vacation home, I want it to have a turret.

Anybody gets to ask any question about any fiction-related issue she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because you fear it will sound obvious or unsophisticated or lame or stupid. Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student’s in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.

The photo above was taken in the Amsterdam airport. "You can just grab any book you want and read. From what I can tell they work on the honor system..."

It's been a while since I've flown, so I don't know if this is feature is in other airports. Do you read the book there, or can you take it on your flight? I'm reminded of a curiosity I noticed at a medical clinic several weeks ago. In the outpatient waiting room there were the usual variety of (uninteresting) magazines. And a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I thought "this can't be a good sign..."

This from an airport that already offers travelers a great collection of art, a casino, a seafood bar, a chocolate bar, a fun forest for kids, a branch of the Rijksmuseum and lots more.

Update: Not wishing to fall behind TYWKIWDBI, the New York Times posted an article about the Schiphol airport library this week:

Opened with little fanfare over the summer, the library — the first ever at a major international airport — has 1,200 books in more than two dozen languages, all by Dutch authors or on subjects relating to the country’s history and culture...

There are 18 million passengers a year that only transfer through Schiphol... their layovers, he said, averaged somewhere between five and seven hours. “Most of these people never leave the airport, so they don’t see anything of Holland.”

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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